April Fools on the Arxiv? Options

[antipode]

Didn't really know where to put this at first, but it really should go here despite the title.

TESS Photometric Mapping of a Terrestrial Planet in the Habitable Zone: Detection of Clouds, Oceans, and Continents
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.12182.pdf

P

[dtolman]

Hopefully third time is the charm getting this post to show up on the site...

The article as posted may appear as a joke - but using Earth as a proxy to provide "ground truth" of how exo-planet Earth analogues would appear is a subject of real research - and as such this does constitute legitimate and useful research. As this article pointed out there are real pitfalls that scientists may not be aware of - for example depending on how the observation campaign is run may make a large impact in how the planet appears in the data (such as their inabiltity to distinguish in the instruments between temporary albedo features - clouds - and permanent landforms over short observation periods).

Previous campaigns to do research into this include Deep Impact's EPOXI extended mission, ground based spectrographs (using reflected earthshine on the moon), and more recently using DSCOVR